Saratoga News Photograph by Scott Lechner This prune box from the days when George Handy owned the Glen Una Ranch was a 'find' Mamoru Inouye made in the garage of his family's home on Canyon Road in Monte Sereno. History Blossoms As Mamoru Inouye turns back the pages, he finds them full of memories of early ranching days By Steve Enders It's been days since the most recent rainfall, yet water drips incessantly from the sturdy oaks that create a green and brown canopy over San Tomas Creek, which flows steadily along the border of Monte Sereno and Saratoga. The creek stretches from urban development and concrete-lined walls downstream to beauty and preservation, telling a tale of days long past farther upstream from a canyon that drops down from the hills. The creek splits the square mile of land once known as the Glen Una Ranch--in its heyday the largest prune-bearing orchard in the world. Just as the Santa Clara Valley once knew orchards and agriculture, so did the foothills of Saratoga and Los Gatos. What was once an enormous, self-sufficient orchard is now, like the rest of the valley, filling up with houses that stand on land once tapped for its abundance of nutrients in a climate considered the most desirable in the industry. The entrepreneurial drive of the people at the turn of the century is still very much in evidence in current residents of the Silicon Valley. People came here from the far reaches of the globe to make money and live better lives. First, it was the Europeans, then the Chinese and others from the Far East, including the Japanese. At the creek's edge, under the dripping old oaks and near the junction of Glen Una and Bellecourt drives, sits an old, two-story white house. It's full of the memories of those days. During the most prosperous times of the Glen Una Ranch, that same house served as a storage space and living quarters for a cadre of dedicated Japanese workers. They were the prune pickers who gave ranch owners a source of cheap labor. Most migrated to the ranch during the bustling harvest season in late summer and through the fall. Afterward, they'd seek odd jobs in and around the Bay Area, using their dollar-a-day salary to take them to the Japantowns of San Jose and San Francisco, hoping to earn a bit more to get by until they were needed again at Glen Una. Mamoru Inouye, the son of one of those Japanese laborers, was born in 1930 on the ranch, after it had passed its glory days and was moving into the modern realities of valley growth and the subdivision of land. Orchards were falling as Mamoru was growing along with the housing boom of pre- and postwar America. This year marks the centennial for a turning point in Inouye's history. It's the 100-year anniversary of his father's trip to the United States on the 2,800-ton S.S. Olympia from Hiroshima, Japan. He came, hoping to make a better life for himself. Leaving Japan's stagnant economy, family and friends behind, the 23-year-old Hirokichi Inouye set out across the Pacific for Tacoma, Wash., and bought a rail ticket to Portland, Ore., hardly looking back after eventually finding his way to San Francisco. "His original destination wasn't the Northwest; it was California," Inouye says. "To go to Tacoma was a shorter distance, or maybe he had heard that the immigration officials there were more lenient than in San Francisco." By 1906, Hirokichi found himself working at the Glen Una Ranch. Today, Hirokichi's son, Mamoru, lives in that old, two-story white house near the creek. He was born and raised there, with the dilapidated ranch serving as his backyard playground. Inouye figures his house is one of the last standing structures from the ranch days. The shipping warehouse is gone now, as are the owner's house, the stables and the hundreds and hundreds of fruit trees. Since retiring from his 40-year career at the NASA Ames Research Center, Mamoru has taken it upon himself to learn his history. Part of that education has included a retrospective on the hardest portion of his life--World War II, which took him, his family and friends to the Japanese internment camps at Heart Mountain, Wyo. Mamoru hasn't forgotten about the camps and the space they occupy in his mind. He's written a book about the experience and is involved in a constant search for more information. Now, however, he is turning another page back in his own history, and is beginning to focus on finding out more about the ranch and his family's place there. At a recent slide-show presentation at the Saratoga Senior Center, about 70 people came to hear Mamoru's take on the history of Glen Una Ranch. Many in the audience were able to add insight to his presentation, calling out their childhood memories and what they knew of the area from stories both remembered and passed on by their parents. Photograph courtesy of Mamoru Inouye Trays of prunes dry on the old Glen Una Ranch where Mamoru Inouye grew up. Some of the history Mamoru knows comes from books he's read about the history of Los Gatos and Saratoga. Other tidbits come from stories he's heard, and others are memories and family stories. His two brothers have also helped reconstruct the family's past, as has his only sister. More information is coming from a search of records held in county and state offices. Mamoru Inouye says that much of the information he's obtained is contradictory about the origins of the ranch. Using two sources, Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years and George Bruntz's The History of Los Gatos, Inouye has at least been able to learn something about the ranch's past. In 1869, following the United States' war against Mexico, a man named Isaac Ludwig bought the land for about $12,000. "You couldn't buy a room in this town now for that much money," Inouye says with a laugh. By 1883, Dr. George W. Handy had taken over, hiring Chinese workers who planted the first fruit trees on the property. Some of those trees, mostly apricots, still stand in residents' yards today. Also during Handy's ownership, the first boxes of prunes began to be sold from the ranch. Recently in his garage, Inouye made a wonderful find. He was sorting through some junk, and picked up a board that was attached to what appeared to be a dresser drawer. He pulled the board from the front, to reveal a perfectly preserved ink stamp of the ranch label on the front of the drawer. The drawer is no drawer--it's a prune box, circa 1890 from Handy's ranch. "California Prunes," the box reads. "Grown and Packed at Glen Una, Saratoga, Santa Clara Co., Cal. by Geo. W. Handy." This is one of the contradictions Inouye can't figure out. Why is the Glen Una stamp on the box from so early in the ranch's history? It wasn't until later that Una Handy was born and the ranch got its name. But still, some accounts of the ranch tell of Una Handy, a book reviewer for a San Francisco newspaper, marrying Frank Glen Hume, the son of the ranch's next owner, George W. Hume, who bought the ranch in 1891. Inouye guesses that the ranch had to have been named after Una Handy, then her first name mingled with "Glen," defined as a mountain valley. Whatever the source of the name--Inouye acknowledges that both stories sound good--Frank Hume died in 1897, around the same time his father's company was in full command of the ranch. The Hume Company's manager, James Farwell, was an entrepreneur in his own right. Farwell owned another company that supplied electric lights to Los Gatos, and was eventually bought out by the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Farwell was also the owner of Los Gatos Telephone, which eventually became GTE. It was during all these ownership changes that events began shaping the newfound life of Inouye's father. He worked the ranch, meticulously pruning the trees, picking prunes and working them over in the 15-acre drying fields in the valley that fronts the canyon against the hillside. The drying field is now a portion of Sky Oak Way. Mamoru also found a payroll book from the ranch, which led to the discovery that his father had been the foreman of all the Japanese workers on the ranch. The book is full of his writing, noting the times worked by all the men there. Flipping through the pages reveals the ranch's slowest and most prosperous times, as two pages contain the names of more than 60 employees--testament to the most sizable harvests. The workers were charged room and board, which was taken out of their monthly salaries. In 1913, Hirokichi Inouye returned to Japan for the first time to retrieve his new bride, Asa. The marriage was likely arranged, Mamoru says, because she was 16 years younger than his father. The two came back on another ship, this time a Japanese freighter, on the same route as before, through Washington and Oregon to California. Between 1914 and 1920, all of Inouye's siblings were born. Then things started going downhill for both the Inouyes and the Glen Una Ranch. Hume had given Hirokichi a choice of property on the ranch to buy, and he decided on the plot of land containing the old living quarters in 1919 because of the already established buildings. He knew it would eventually make a good home for his family. Also in 1919, various parcels on the ranch began to be sold and subdivided, costing about $1,800 an acre. Inouye has some of the advertising used to attract homeowners to the area, which tell of a subtropical climate and shady groves of trees. The Inouyes' neighbor was one of the area's more famous residents at the time, Sen. James D. Phelan, who also served as mayor of San Francisco and was the man who built Villa Montalvo. Phelan was also the architect of animosity toward "Orientals." His fiery speeches helped pave the way for a series of alien land laws that passed during the 1920s. First, Phelan attacked the Chinese and later turned his attention to the Japanese, which included his ranch neighbors down the hill. To counter the land laws, Inouye's father, with the help of George Hume, hired a lawyer in San Jose and established the Glen Hill Farming Company, a registered, legal corporation, which named Mamoru's infant brothers as the main shareholders. Since they were rightful citizens of America, they could own the 14-acre property and the house even if their father couldn't. This loophole in the law was later closed, Mamoru says. "My father ran the ranch right through the 1920s. He operated everything right here; we had a drying field and everything. He was purchasing prunes from orchards that still existed, and we went and picked the prunes. We even had a raspberry patch back here and we sold those," Inouye says. He continues, "My memories go back to the mid-1930s when I started school at the Oak Street School. I picked prunes every day. Every morning in the summer or fall, we'd start at the top of the hill and work our way down. I'd get a small bucket, and my father paid me per bucket. I even kept a bank account with Bank of America in Los Gatos, depositing my pennies and nickels. He made sure we kept busy." But his father didn't want the children to be farmers, Inouye says, and one of the most unfortunate events in America this century would tear Hirokichi's sons away from even the most remote possibility of that ever happening. "We had a happy life before World War II," Inouye says. "Then with Pearl Harbor, that changed life for everyone, especially my father." Photograph courtesy of Mamoru Inouye In its heyday, Glen Una was the largest prune-bearing orchard in the world. Japanese laborers provided a source of cheap labor. On May 23, 1942, the U.S. government issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 96. "That was the last day my father would ever see the ranch," he says. It meant a trip out of California for Inouye and his family, taking with them only what they could carry. The family, and hundreds of other Japanese-Americans reported to the train station in Los Gatos, and traveled to the men's gymnasium of then-San Jose State College. They'd later be transferred to Santa Anita Racetrack in Southern California, and eventually be shipped to Wyoming in January of 1943. "The timing of the war was unfortunate," Inouye says. "The second generation [of Japanese immigrants] was just coming of age during the war. My parents were looking forward to retirement, then all of that changed." Then only 12, Inouye called the converted horse stables at Heart Mountain home for the next two years. In Wyoming, the children were able to attend school and lead somewhat normal lives. During the family's absence, the attorney in San Jose leased the Inouye house under the farming company's name. Two different tenants kept the house during the two years. While they didn't keep the orchard and fruit plants in shape, they did keep the house up, saving most of the mementos that Mamoru now cherishes. Hirokichi Inouye died when he was 69 in 1945 while in internment, just before the internees were set free by the U.S. government. The army gave each person a meal, $25 and a train ticket to wherever they wanted to go. In 1946, the Inouyes were lucky and thankful to be home. Not every Japanese internee had a place to return to. Mamoru Inouye enrolled at Los Gatos High School while his mother took on various housekeeping jobs to keep the family afloat. Life was difficult back home, Inouye says. Although he says he was always treated well by his friends, not all Japanese shared in his good fortune. Some animosity toward Japanese remained after the war, especially in this area, where only about 1 percent of the population was non-white. "I missed two months of school," Inouye says. "I had some quick catching up to do." Inouye's thoughts never went past high school at the time, he says, but later on he'd enroll at Santa Clara University and earn a mechanical engineering degree. Mamoru Inouye now lives on what used to be the glorious Glen Una Ranch with his wife of 18 years, Yasuko. The inside of their home is rustic, yet comfortably equipped with the modern conveniences of 1999--100 years after his father discovered the place, tucked away in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The house was remodeled in 1929 to make it more suitable for family life, which is what the Inouyes are enjoying now as Mamoru begins reconstructing the ranch's past. The beautiful spring blossoms of thousands of prune trees may be gone, but memories will always remain on the land that was Glen Una. [ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 10, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.